uded between the
Britons of Cornwall and of Wales. In such a case it will inevitably
happen that before very long differences of speech will begin to reveal
themselves between those to whom even dialectic distinctions may have
been once unknown. The divergences will be of various kinds. Idioms will
come up in the separated body, which, not being recognized and allowed
by those who remain the arbiters of the language, will be esteemed by
them, should they come under their notice, violations of its law, or at
any rate departures from its purity. Again, where a colony has gone
forth into new seats, and exists under new conditions, it is probable
that the necessities, physical and moral, rising out of these new
conditions, will give birth to words, which there will be nothing to
call out among those who continue in the old haunts of the nation.
Intercourse with new tribes and people will bring in new words, as, for
instance, contact with the Indian tribes of North America has given to
American English a certain number of words hardly or not at all allowed
or known by us; or as the presence of a large Dutch population at the
Cape has given to the English spoken there many words, as 'inspan',
'outspan'{135}, 'spoor', of which our home English knows nothing.

{Sidenote: _Antiquated English_}

There is another cause, however, which will probably be more effectual
than all these, namely, that words will in process of time be dropped by
those who constitute the original stock of the nation, which will not be
dropped by the offshoot; idioms which those have overlived, and have
stored up in the unhonoured lumber-room of the past, will still be in
use and currency among the smaller and separated section which has gone
forth; and thus it will come to pass that what seems and in fact is the
newer swarm, will have many older words, and very often an archaic air
and old-world fashion both about the words they use, their way of
pronouncing, their order and manner of combining them. Thus after the
Conquest we know that our insular French gradually diverged from the
French of the Continent. The Prioress in Chaucer's _Canterbury Tales_
could speak her French "full faire and fetishly", but it was French, as
the poet slyly adds,

"After the scole of Stratford atte bow,
For French of Paris was to hire unknowe".

One of our old chroniclers, writing in the reign of Elizabeth, informs
us that by the English colonists within the Pale i